Kashmir
by Solus Nemo
Summary: “I live for the soul purpose of destroying myself.” Oneshot, borderline AU.


**Title:** Kashmir  
**Author:** "Solus Nemo"  
**Summary:** "I live for the sole purpose of destroying myself." One-shot, borderline AU.**  
Rating:** PG-13**  
Author's Note:** **A**lternate **U**niverse warning thrown in here just because I feel better that way. It mentions actual events in the show, but I pulled a lot of other things out of thin air.  
**Disclaimer:** From first word to last this story is fictional. I do not own the television series "Degrassi: The Next Generation" nor anything else affiliated with it. I own only the characters of "Degrassi" I have made up. Lord Voldemort is clearly owned by J. K. Rowling and not myself.**  
**

&&&

Self-destruction, that's what I'm good at and in all honesty I can't give you a reason _why_. I can't sit you down and tell you how I got this way, why I'm like this, because I don't know. I don't understand why I hate everyone, why I don't let anyone get too close to me, why I have to be such a bastard all the time. I do know, however, that my need to destroy myself is far greater than my need for oxygen.

It's not like my father's a drunk who one day drove a knife into my mother's heart after walking into the master bedroom to find my mother having sex with another woman on the bed, killed her and her sex toy in cold blood and is now spending the rest of his time in prison. I'll be the first to admit that it quite possibly should be that way, that it would help explain a lot of things about me, but I can't because nothing like that ever happened.

I live with my grandmother, a feisty old widow who runs a very successful bridal boutique. She makes all the wedding gowns that are displayed in that small shop and sometimes I find myself being the pin boy. I've lived with her close to ten years now, but not because my parents were killed in a car crash or were involved in this crazy murder/suicide plot or were driven insane by an evil wizard using the fake title of Lord Voldemort. I call my home the apartment above Morena's Bridal Boutique not because my mother died during childbirth and my father ran off to be a crack addict male prostitute, but because my parents are both very much alive and well, traveling the world doing their archaeological duties.

You see, my parents wanted me to have a life on stable ground so my grandma Helen (my mother's mother) opened her arms to me. I hold no grudges for my parents' decision, I couldn't care less about the ancient bones of ape men. My parents and I exchange letters and e-mails so often it's a wonder I don't have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. We all gather around the web cams during the holidays and open the packages we send each other from halfway around the world, eat our turkey and cranberry sauce or hunt for Easter eggs over the monitors. Maybe I _should_ hate my parents for sticking me with my grandmother in this small town and not taking me with them to South Africa or the Dutch Isles or what other place they happen to be visiting, but I don't.

I love my parents very much and when I say "No, Ma, being carried away by an eagle while you and Dad dig up old monkey bones really isn't my thing" I mean every word. I hate to travel, I can't even read the map in a moving car without getting motion sickness. I don't like the sun and I'm not too fond of sitting at a desk being eaten alive by mosquitoes while paging through text books, trying to figure out whether the bone in front of me is part of a femur or tibia. Nope, I very much prefer staying in this sleepy little town with Grandma.

There's no easy way to explain how am I because I don't know why I'm like this. I mean, the only reason why I'm so pissy with the gay community is because I fear what's different, just like most other anti-homosexuals. I'm not even homophobic, which also could explain a lot if that were true. I was never caught in a moment with a gay person and forever scarred because of it, I'm just uneasy with how different they are. See, not scared _of _them, just scared of them because they're different – it's not the same thing. I suppose that doesn't really shed a light on my actions against gays, namely that Marco Del Rossi and Dylan Michaelchuk, but then again fear of difference doesn't make an acceptable excuse for a guy taking a baseball bat to some homosexual's skull.

I hate most likely just for the sake of hating something. That's the easiest way I can put it and there doesn't seem to be any other fitting explanation. I am a self-destructor and in order to self-destruct most efficiently I need to despise for no apparent reason.

I'm guessing you must be asking yourself "Why hasn't he mentioned is grandfather yet? I bet he did something so horrific to poor little Jason that's the reason he hasn't been mentioned yet. Child pornography or something even worse."

_Well_. Fuck you, too. My grandfather is spinning so in his grave that he's popped up in China. Carl was a very respectable and loving man (but not too loving, mind you), the greatest grandfather a kid could ever ask for. He once helped me build a sandcastle four and a half feet high. He would eat the cookie patties of Oreos when I was a kid because I would only scrape off the filling. He sat through _The Lion King_ three times with me and not once yelled at me for falling asleep at the beginning of the third viewing. He died in his sleep at the age of ninety-five without ever abusing me in any way, shape or form, thank you very much.

So there you have it, the family card in the hand of my life has nothing to do with how much of a raging prick I am. Friends not so much either, but mainly because I've never had many of them. I'm a private person, I don't "share", and I'm either so smart or so dimwitted I can never seem to truly relate to anyone.

Maybe I'm a psychopath.

That's a scary thought, but I don't think I meet all the requirements. I don't mimic human emotion for one, I can feel every last one of them. I also don't get sexually aroused by killing anyone, nor have I ever ended someone's life by my own two hands. To my knowledge I've also never fantasied about killing anyone. There, glad that's out of the way.

All right. I'm not a psychopath and hate just for the fun of it, my family life is relatively normal and I've never been scarred enough emotionally to give an acceptable answer as to why I'm so goddamn asshole-ish. Of course, that leaves the question: why would anyone _willingly_ want to achieve total self-destruction? For me it's like this pathological need, much like the act of breathing.

When I ruin myself enough so that one day I disappear from this world with a _pop!_ and a puff of smoke, my life's work will have been completed.

To put it simply, it's a drive. I must have been born with this ever growing, desperate urge to destroy myself because I can't remember a moment without it. I have to pick pieces of myself away until one day there's nothing left of me, I _have_ to keep pulling this string that's causing me to slowly but surely unravel. Writers must write, painters must paint, and I must take a sledge hammer to the granite statue of myself. It's an impulse I have no control over.

I know that's a stupid thing to say, "I have no control over it", but it's the truth. Some people like to insist upon the fact that every last person in the world has control over every last aspect of their lives, but they're full of shit. There are some things you can't control and my self-destructive driven actions are one of them. If I really did have control over my impulses, I would stop. What, did you think I actually enjoy hurting people?

To some degree I might like hating people, but not hurting them. My goal in life is to hurt myself until I just fall apart, but not other people. Wounding someone other than myself is a total waste of my energy. I suppose causing pain to other people is an unchangeable side affect to my actions, though.

If I'm going to get a blowjob in the back of a van someone else has to get hurt, a rule of nature. I'm not on speaking terms with that rule, but I'm not about to hop in a time machine and go back in time, erase those moments from the time-line of human existence just because a few people's feelings got hurt. I'm trying to destroy myself here and if I did that I would be taking two giant steps back; I would be going farther away from my goal, not closer to it.

In the clichéd image of myself in my mind's eye all I need is a few more cracks to the porcelain skin of the doll and it'll fall to dust. When that happens, when my soul is no more, no one else needn't be hurt ever again. I'll be gone and because of my absence from the world no one will be wounded by my actions for the rest of eternity. I don't know how long it will take achieve that fatal blow, but it's almost palpable.

And though in the grand scheme of things I don't know dick, I do know that I am in love with her. I've also wounded her the most, something I never intentionally meant to do. She doesn't believe me, of course, because I've never told her that. All the better for me. Unrequited love is the greatest annihilator of all, a cancer of the heart of which there is no cure.

For a moment in time maybe it wasn't unrequited love, maybe she felt for me the way I was never able to voice to her. But then again, maybe she was just trying to achieve complete self-destruction as well. If she had stayed with me I'm sure we could have done that together.

See, I wanted to love her. I only acknowledged that want deep in the shadows of my mind, but we conversed often enough to make it like a fire within my chest. I've had sex with other people before, that's a well-known fact, but I've never _loved_ anyone. It's all the difference in the world and I would've liked for her to be my first. If she had stayed around long enough I would have, then she would have gotten what she probably wanted in the first place.

That would have put an end to me a lot sooner than anything else, loving her. But I would regret everything if by loving her I would have razed her too. That wouldn't be fair.

I won't say, either, that I wish that everything that happened in the aftermath of my decision didn't. Again, if I hadn't hurt anyone it would have moved me back several spaces on the Game Board of Progress. Something always has to give and I'll be damned before it's my intent of complete decimation.

I feel as though I won't be missing out on anything once my dream comes to fruition, I only have my eyes on my goal. No career has ever piqued my interest save my current job of self-devastation. Nothing else in life has ever really made me care more than putting an end to myself.

Maybe I'm just horribly naïve with a distorted view on life.

If I am, so be it. My intellect is comprised of nothing else, this is all I know – or don't know, since there's a lot I'm fuzzy on. I'm perfectly happy with what I have, I don't mind if I'm wearing blinders. I've never really felt fully human at any given moment in my life, why not try acting like a horse for a while?

Once I've met my mark of self-destruction I might still long for her, I'm in love with her after all, but I think I can deal with that. In wounding her so deeply which helped my cause, she no longer wants anything to do with me. I can understand that and my wish is not to bring pain to her again. So while I might keep on loving her she can move on and be happy, Lord knows she deserves it.

Though it's easy to see where she might be moving on to after my goal is reached, I have no idea what will happen to me. I try not to think about it. I try to just keep my eyes closed and wait for the cold water to surround me when I take the plunge off the cliff.

I'd like to think I'm ready for anything, but in reality I'm not. I wasn't ready for a lot of things, falling in love for one. I don't suppose that's a bad thing because it's kind of nice to be on your toes and taken by surprise once and a while. There's something comforting about being smacked in the back of the head with a large piece of wood labeled "the unexpected", though I don't take kindly to the throbbing pain afterwards.

Some people might call that living, being met with something that dumbfounds you because you were prepared for something else to come along, but I don't see it as living at all. I've never had a firm grasp on living, so I just connect being shocked with a warm fire and a book and call it a day.

To me we're born and are handed a slip of paper with our main dream written on it with nice, slanting, elegant handwriting (I live for the sole purpose of destroying myself). We live just to make that dream come true and once we do we either live it out for a while or die right away. If I had to pin a definition on living that's what it would be, but even I don't think it's wholly correct.

Maybe that's the definition a weak person would give, maybe only a weak person could possibly say in one way or another "we live to die".

I am weak.

The weak are born with the need to undo themselves, either they're aware of it like I am or they're not, and sooner or later they get what they so painfully want, _need_. They aren't strong enough to deal with things, at least that's how I look at, so they strive for self-destruction. That final push – love being the greatest shove of all – gives the weak all they need to leave the world, either by dancing with a train or drinking a glass of wine laced with Windex or a noose or whatever other tool they use.

Emma Nelson was my final push.

So thank you, Emmaline. You have helped me put the final touches on my life's work and if you're reading this know that your helping hand means more to me than you will most likely ever know.

I would say that I'm sorry for doing this, but what would be the point? My goal in life, what I was born to do, was to self-destruct and I'm not going to apologize for that goal being met. That's what they teach kids, isn't it: to keep on dreaming, to keep on making goals for yourself and to never stop until you reach them? All of you should be proud of me, then, for I have set out to do something and I never once thought about quitting.

Strength. That's why I'm like the way I am, I don't have any. Maybe I would have stuck around longer had I hadn't been made without it, maybe I would have been born with a healthier mind – surely thoughts and aspirations like mine are only that of a diseased mind of sorts. But then I wouldn't have been the person you came to either hate or love, which I'm sure most people fell on the former side of the fence.

But, like they say, don't cry about what you lost, smile about what you had – in my case reverse that and you'll be fine.

I hold no regrets and neither should you. I did what I had set out to do. I might be able to finally control my impulses now, I might also now be able to have strength and courage. Be happy for me, huh?

Sincerely,

Jay.


End file.
